I am taking this course and I have found that when importing the images from the folder into Adobe InDesign (2015 version I have) my pictures are pixelated. Is there a setting I need to change in order to make them not become pixelated? The Green at Heart logo and Lunch pic are very pixelated.

Thanks,
Levi

Daniel Scott - 1 year ago

Hey Levi. The images will print & PDF fine. You just need to go to View > Display Performance > High Quality Display. That should fix it. Let me know how you go. - Dan.

Nataly Hollingsworth - 1 year ago

Thanks for this!! My imports were looking pixelated, too!

~Nataly

Chrystal - 1 year ago

This worked a treat! I was having the same issue but this cleared everything up (pun intended)!!

Nelly Wahlfort - 6 months ago

Hi, I have a problem with the exercise files. I can download and see everything fine but not save in order to find them and import them in InDesign. Tried saving them both to my dropbox and pc, is there an easy way to import them from the zip files?
Thanks,
Nelly

Emma Norton - 6 months ago

mmmm weird. Are you unzipping the zip file once you download it? This is all I can think of that might cause you to have a problem. Otherwise I'm not sure why you can't access the files.

Arthur Williams - 3 months ago

Hi,

I don't have the rotation options or a bar at the top of the screen, I just have a ruler. How do I add this, I've been into preferences, window and searched google but haven't found a solution.

Howdy, partners? In this video we're going to look at bringing in images, and logos, and rotating them, and we'll look at this one, where we've cropped it, you can see, look at this, sneaky. This was actually a little bit bigger. So we'll crop them into a nice little box. We'll flip them, we'll do all sorts of stuff with images. All right, let's go and do that now.

To bring in an image, icon, or any sort of visual graphic, its the same. First thing we need to do though is, we need to get into the habit of-- if I have my black arrow selected, and just click off in this dark gray area around the side here, so there's nothing selected. There's a more official way, you can go to 'Edit', 'Deselect All'. Its a long way. We've got nothing selected, now we'll go to 'File', 'Place'. Remember, that's 'Import' for InDesign. Pick the '01 Flyer' folder, and there's one there called 'Lunch'. Now your cursor is loaded with this little image, and you've got two ways of putting it in there.

Now when you're bringing in images in InDesign it can confuse you when you're new. The easiest way is, over here, in the gray area, to click once. That will bring in my image at full size. If its coming in too big, you can go to 'Edit', 'Undo Place', that kind of goes back. And what I want to do is click, hold, and drag in this gray area. Doesn't really matter how big, you can see, that's the size of my image. If its coming through really, really big just click and drag it out to a more appropriate size. The reason I do that is-- I'm going to 'Edit', 'Undo' again, or 'Control Z' on a Mac, or 'Command Z' on a PC, so 'undone'. If I click it on this green box here the icon changes, its a little bit hard to see. Tayla will zoom in for us, so you can see the brackets appear.

It all means that if I click on this, its kind of merged them together, my green box is gone forever. You might want that, that's cool, so you can do that. What I do is-- I find that's always a pain, 'Edit', 'Undo', 'Undo'… I'm going to keep going 'undo' until that's back, and remember, I can just click once out here, in the background. Let's look at some other things we can do with images.

First of all, probably you would want to re-size them. So resizing them seems easy. You grab the black arrow, grab the corner, and you drag it up and weirdly it does that by default. Lovely InDesign. I'm going to 'undo'. So what we need to do is, our first shortcut. We're not going to learn too many in this course. There's going to be a cheat sheet for loads of shortcuts, but what we want to do is learn a couple of the more practical ones. In this case, its resizing an image. And you hold down, on a Mac, it's 'Command' and 'Shift', if you're on a PC, it's 'Control' and 'Shift'. Hold those two down on your keyboard. Grab this corner now, and drag it up and you see, it re-sizes. Strange, long shortcut, I know its just the way InDesign is, we can resize it that way.

To rotate it, there's a manual rotation at the top here. This little indicator, if I need it to be 45° I can just type it in, and it rotates. I'm going to 'undo'. If you want to do it just more casually, or you're just playing with the design, with the same black arrow, hover-- you can see, on the edge here, it does the resizing thing. If I hover just in front of that, you can see my icon changes. This little double headed arrow. I can click, hold, and drag that now, and you can see, clicking, holding, dragging, and it's more of a custom rotation. I'm going to 'undo' that.

Another thing we might do is 'flip' it. At the top here-- I've got it selected, with my black arrow, and there's this option here that flips it horizontally. Sometimes it ends up all the way over here and you have to click and drag it back across. And flipping it vertically does it at the top there as well. So I'm going to 'undo', 'undo', and we have got a flipped image. The next thing we're going to look at is something called the 'Content Grabber'. It's this little target that appears. Now, when you try to just move your image around, say I need to move it down the bottom here, avoid this thing completely. So I'm going to click and drag anywhere, but there, and I can move it around. If I drag this, what happens is, in InDesign, your image is actually inside a picture frame already. They are two separate things, and you can move them individually which is quite handy sometimes, but it can be a bit annoying when you're learning.

So, if I click, and drag this, 'Content Grabber' you'll see the frame, you'll see in there, he's still there, but the picture within that frame has slid to the side. That can be quite cool when you try to crop things. And I can drag it back. I'm going to 'undo' a couple of times. Remember, 'Edit', 'Undo'. I'm going to use my shortcut. So what you need to do is, if you're physically moving it, click anywhere but the target, but if you want to move it within the frame you can drag that little 'Content Grabber'. I'm going to 'undo'. If you really don't like the 'Content Grabber'-- secret note, I don't like it. And to turn this off, I go to 'View', and I go to 'Extras', 'Hide Content Grabber'. There are other ways of copying stuff. Up to you, you don't have to turn it off, you might love it, lots of people do.

What we're going to do now is look at some basic cropping. What I want to do is, I would like this thing-- let's click, hold, and drag it, so its at least in the top right. It kind of snaps, its pretty clever, its snapping to the edges. If yours is not snapping, just double check 'View'. There's one in here that's called 'Smart Guides'. So 'Grids & Guides', 'Smart Guides' that's the thing that helps it to automatically jump to the edge, you don't have to be perfect, Pixel perfect, it will jump in there for you. So I want it definitely in the top right. I'm going to grab this bottom left, and I'm going to hold down my shortcut to resize it. Who remembers what the shortcut was? That's right, 'Command Shift' on a Mac, and 'Control Shift' on a PC, so I'm dragging it out. I want it to be at least, or bigger than our background image. So I want it snapped up in the corner there, and what I want to do is, remember, if I hold those two shortcut keys down it resizes it, but if I don't remember, when I grabbed it before, it kind of crops it, and that's going to work in our favor now because what I want to do is, just grab this side, and maybe in the middle, roughly in the middle I want it to be like this.

So I'm at the bottom, I'm going to drag it out so its just on my 'Bleed'. I'm copying bits of the image off, I know, but that's the kind of look I'm looking for. And what I also might want to do is move the 'Content Grabber'. I hated it, but its kind of handy now, look, I can drag the center of it, and you can see, I can drag it within this box, little bits.

Let's bring in one more thing, let's bring in the 'logo'. Exact same technique as the image. Remember, black arrow, click in the background, so you got nothing selected, go to 'File', 'Place', pick one of the logos, I'm going to use this first one, 'Logo1 Full'. It doesn't have to be a JPEG, or a PNG, it can be an Illustrator file, which is another Adobe product. Let's click 'Open'. Remember, in this gray area, in the background, click once, or you can click and drag to get the size that you want. And black arrow, grab anywhere, but the 'Content Grabber'.

Remember, if I try and move him using the center bit, weirdly the image is over here, but the frame is still over here, so I'm going to 'undo' that. Click off in the background, and I'm going to grab anywhere, but the 'Content Grabber', and I'm going to stick it there somewhere. There's my lovely logo. Earlier I said, maybe you ought to have nothing selected, I'll show you the reason why. If I have this green box selected by accident, and I want to bring in my logo-- before I brought in this logo, so I've got this green box selected, 'File'. I've forgotten to 'deselect' it, go to 'Place', and I go to my logo, and I click open, it doesn't give me the option of dragging it out, and giving it a size, it just kind of fuses it with this green box which is cool, but its kind of stuck there now. They're one and the same. So I'm going to 'undo' until life was easier. So remember, before you bring it in, just 'deselect' in the background and then go to 'File', 'Place'.

Well my friends, that is working with images. Let’s go on and start working with 'Type' in InDesign.